Musings on the byways of popular culture
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I picked this cheapie up in NZ second hand. It’s on Pegasus which I understand is a budget label.I recognised some tracks but not others including some nice country style ballads.
Anyone got any info?
https://www.discogs.com/Curtis-Mayfield-Baby-Doll/release/9509874
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A fab Sheffield artist is making ‘cartoon workshop for beginners’ tutorials and will be posting them online, starting today. So if you have kids who are budding artists it might keep them entertained for a while. My son usually does after school Cartoon Club on a Wednesday, so this is perfect for him, as becoming a cartoon artist/animator is his back up plan for if he doesn’t make it as an actor (don’t worry, we’ll ensure he has a different back up plan too!).
https://www.petemckee.com/news/pete-mckees-cartoon-workshop-for-beginners!
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The great live music show Austin City Limits has opened up some of its archive to help people get through lock down / the Corona virus
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Those of us who work in the creative sector are massively heartened by the generosity of artists in responding to the current emergency. Today it’s sci-fi writers. Paul McAuley, one of British sci-fi’s leading authors, has made his ‘best of’ short stories available for free until Friday from the tax dodgers
https://smile.amazon.co.uk/dp/B073NXRMWJ/ref=pe_385721_48724741_TE_M1DP
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While away an hour with the latest albumtoalbum episode – Stuart Maconie and I ramble at length about Diamond Dogs, taking in 1970s Wigan, glam rock, the welfare state, The Beatles, the Stones, playing the ‘exactly!’ game with Alan McGee, McCartney and the avant-garde, Bowie’s guitar playing and how the nominal successor to Aladdin Sane, Hallowe’en Jack arrives and leaves in just one line. By one hour in, we’ve barely got past ‘Sweet Thing’, so this is the first in God knows how many episodes. But, this can be an ideal accompaniment for your daily allocated time in the exercise yard.
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What does it sound like?:
Conceived as a dire warning for mankind in the face of a climate change catastrophe, We Are Sent Here By History resonates even more powerfully as nature fights back and inflicts a mutant virus on us all. Listening to it just as the whole world is embroiled in the kind of existential threat the album describes is both a sobering and exhilarating experience.
Shabaka Hutchings is a restless soul, born in Barbados but raised in London, he is a wandering minstrel, who leads no fewer than three bands, the electronic dance influenced The Comet Is Coming, the polyrhythmic Caribbean-style Sons Of Kemet and these, The Ancesters. It’s no wonder he is drawn to the African tradition of griot, in which a dazzling showman, instrumentalist, and storyteller, travels from village to village to spread the news, connecting one community with another and the past with the present and the future.
Siyabonga Mthembu’s vocals, as the griot, are pivotal to the album. He chants in Zulu and Xhosa, he recites the visionary poetry of Lindokuhle Nkosi, he raps and he sings, he screams, he implores, he cajoles. He rails against God on You’ve Been Called, » Continue Reading.
Julie Felix left the building 2 days ago.
I remember wanting to go to the zoo with her when I was 11, but I have always loved this duet.
https://youtu.be/f1EJ-ITAcEU
First to solve them without reading the youtube comments.
https://youtu.be/48cUTewEiTc
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What does it sound like?:
I do love The Unthanks. I saw them on many occasions with the ten piece band, various times with smaller outfits, once with a full orchestra for backing and then, last spring at Union Chapel in Islington, I saw Rachel Unthank, Becky Unthank and Niopha Keegan still the very air around us and hold the lucky several hundred present with nothing but their unaccompanied voices and not even a clog dance to add percussion.
That Union Chapel show is one of several from the Unaccompanied As We Are tour which has contributed performances on this latest addition to the Unthanks’ Diversions albums series. Previous Diversions releases have gathered songs by theme or songwriter, but this collection is grouped by style, songs in the style in which Rachel Becky started performing in Northumberland folk clubs. It is utterly lovely.
In the years before this tour there was a danger that The Unthanks could turn into the Adrian McNally band. Adrian, musical arranger and former Mr Rachel Unthank, creates brilliant music culminating in Mount the Air, for me one of the very best albums so far this century, but his influence began to overshadow the pure » Continue Reading.
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It doesn’t sound like Vol 2 will be out before 2023 at the earliest. Better find something else to read in the meantime!
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The name may cause a few seconds of head scratching before I say, ‘the guy who drew Asterix’. How I loved those books when I was a kid. No trip to the library was complete without looking for one I hadn’t read at last ten times before. If there was not one the Tintin would do, but I found him too clean cut (though more likely the Herge books were too sophisticated for me), but my heart belonged to Asterix and the other Gauls.
Those who give us joy in childhood keep a special place in our hearts. Writer René Goscinny, along with the translators into English, deserves equal credit for the books’ success but it was the vivid colours and dynamic force of Uderzo’s illustrations which made the first and most lasting impression on me. As we have a little down time at the moment I shall see if I can dig some Asterix books out to revisits and raise a glass to him.
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Loved this bloke. Saw him at the Hammersmith Palais circa 1983. Creator of the Makossa Beat. Play it next to Isaac Hayes’s Shaft.
I’ve got a couple of solo piano records of his. A little bit saccharine but no lack of dexterity and he did a lot of production too.
RIP Manu.
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I have sung the praises of the Sth African jazz funk reissue label Matsuli.
They are doing what a few others are doing at the moment by making stuff available free.
https://matsulimusic.bandcamp.com/album/mzansi-afro-jazz-sounds-matsuli-label-sampler
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Well that was a Proustian rush! Watching Ready Steady Go in my teens was a formative experience. I watched a lot of the shows in the school holidays (I was away at school during term-time). Some great clips included in this programme, such as that of the Stones miming to ‘I Got You Babe’, complete with Andrew Loog Oldham. And the Motown and Otis Redding Specials. Wonderful stuff with Dusty performing with the Marvelettes, Eric Burdon and Chris Farlowe with Otis. Sadly, I believe that the James Brown special was wiped. I’m not sure how the BBC managed to sort the issue with the rights to RSG. I thought that Dave Clark owned the rights but has been very protective of them.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000gg2t/the-story-of-ready-steady-go
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Bri has been asked to curate a playlist which has “Hope” as its theme. Anyone like to help the poor wee lad? Here’s one from me
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Scottish politicians are so refreshingly to the point.
Hats off to voice-over artists Janey Godley for this.
“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.” Burns got that right!
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Was going to post this on the triple-hamper How are we all doing? thread, but it might get lost there, so…
I love having my savage breast soothed, and I love watching orchestras doing what they do close up. The Berlin Philharmonic have made all their concerts free to watch on their website. Perfect. You just need to register using the voucher.
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https://www.facebook.com/100002749745275/posts/2300446043390365/?d=n
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For anyone who hasn’t spent 34 minutes listening to this call to BBC5Live, last night.
Please listen to the end. It could be the most important 34 minutes of your life.
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Author:Duncan Harris/Kevan Furbank
The next two artists covered in this ongoing series make strange bedfellows indeed, coming from opposite ends of the musical spectrum, although perhaps there is a connection in their longevity, both having been around in various guises for over fifty years now.
My Hawkwind period really runs from In Search Of Space through to Hall Of The Mountain Grill, encompassing of course the mighty Space Ritual live set – what memories listening to that one! Subsequent albums were very much a mixed bag, ranging from good, eg Quark, Strangeness and Charm, Levitation, through run of the mill to frankly poor – too many fall into these last two categories unfortunately, At least recent years have seen something of a resurgence with The Machine Stops and Into The Woods, showing there is still some creative fuel left in the tank after all these years and all those drugs.
Fairport Convention must have had as many different line ups as Hawkwind over the past five decades. Again, my interest was more around their early work from What We Did On Our Holidays through to Full House really. There’s some great music there, and that run of albums really encompasses » Continue Reading.
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We managed to get some pasta about a week ago (just a couple of packets of spaghetti, my daughter lives on it). I’m more aware than usual of trying not to waste food as the store cupboard staples we are used to always having such as the aforementioned pasta, tinned tomatoes, baked beans etc, are currently hard to come by. Tonight, we are having spaghetti with a red pepper and passata sauce with a hint of chilli. I’m drinking the last of a poor bottle of red and I’m not sure I can be bothered to try and find any more as the wine shelves in t(e supermarkets are almost as bare as the dried goods and tinned foods aisles. I’m listening to Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game album as my daughter covered the title track for her GCSE music exam piece. How about you?
I’ve mused for a while that, at least in terms of the folk music world in mainland Britain, a change was likely. I understand anecdotally that the folk club model from the 1950s/60s is coming to a natural end as the generally older people who have kept those places going are stepping back and not enough younger people want to take on the responsibility. So be it. I understand something similar is happening at the grassroots end of jazz in Britain too. In short, the amateur pub/club infrastructure that has allowed some people to be professional performers is coming to a conclusion after a period of 60 or 70 years – a generation and a half, really.
This coincides with other significant changes in the music world – ill-paid Spotify plays replacing CD/download sales, the decline of record labels, the lesser importance of music in people’s lives, etc.
Being a musician with professional aspirations or actually having music as your main income hasn’t had a landscape that full of obstacles, I believe, in the whole of the ‘modern era’ – say, from Lonnie Donegan onward. And then Covid 19 arrives.
I don’t, in a very general sense, have » Continue Reading.
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No doubt this current predicament the World faces is a pile of shit. As a born optimist I have to look to the World post Coronavirus. In view of the fact that pubs and restaurants are taking a right kicking I believe we have a duty to spend a lot of time in them when normality returns. Let’s make sure we have a great fuck off party.
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Reading Eltons Autobiography at present and really enjoying it. It inspired me to give Goodbye Yellow Brick road a spin – you don’t get many better opening tracks than this one.
